Link building is the exercise of SEO. With a good link building campaign you can improve the rankings of your website and bring new, more competitive keywords into reach. Links strengthen your website. So, it’s important to know how many inbound links you have pointing to your website and what pages / keywords may need some more targeting.

There are two things that you track regarding inbound links. Read More

Search ranking reports are critical to any SEO campaign. With search ranking reports you can track the progress of your SEO work and find insights into ways you can increase your search traffic even more.

The primary way most people track the results of search engine optimization is by running search ranking reports. These reports tell you where your website is currently ranking in the major search engines for your targeted keywords. The reports themselves don’t affect your rankings, but they do give you insight into the effect of the work you have done and what areas you may need to improve on.

Let’s say when you first started the optimization process, you decided to target some less competitive keywords because your website was new and you wanted to start getting more website traffic as soon as possible.
As part of your plan, you targeted those keywords with both the on-page optimization as well as Read More

From MyNakedPastor.com to coffee houses in the sanctuary churches have been trying to reach the world and appear “relevant”, especially the younger generations. After all, according to one study, “70 percent of young adults ages 23-30 stopped attending church regularly for at least a year between ages 18-22.” So, we have to do something, right? But are we doing the right “something”? Read More

I was thinking about SEO and the importance of running reports and tracking metrics when it struck me that it’s very similar to trying to loose weight.

Optimization and link building are like diet and exercise. Through your diet you fine tune the foods that you eat focusing on the healthier foods that help your body to run well. At the same time, you exercise, building up your bodies strength and ability to perform. Read More

I like to post videos on Fridays both as a fun way to end the week, to promote videos created by churches, and to emphasize the way videos can be a great church marketing strategy. Most of the videos I’ve posted have been scripted style videos, like skits, which have been made by Churches or Christian groups to convey a specific message. However, church videos don’t have to fit that format.

Earlier this month I posted a video of a deer that was made from the security camera footage of a church. Back in May I posted a video a family made about the life-saving miracle God performed on their new born child. This week our video is simply a clip either from church service or presentation at a conference. The point is that church videos don’t have to be scripted stories or take hours of production time. Many churches feel that they don’t have the equipment or know how to create a good church video, but these videos illustrate that you don’t have to have a film studio, professional cameras, or even great script writers.

On to this week’s video of a funny story about a little kitten. I found it while reading a post from David Tonen’s blog, navigateyourmarketing.com.

You’ve performed keyword research. You optimized your website for the search engines. You have even started a link building campaign to gain untold numbers of relevant, inbound links. So, you’re done right? Wrong. It’s time to see the effects of all this work, re-evaluate the optimization, and plan your next move.

Tracking the progress and effects of the SEO work you are doing is critical to the success of your SEO church marketing. So, what are the important things you need to be tracking and how do you track them?

Twitter is huge. With more and more churches making their way to Twitter it’s good to know some things about how to best use Twitter. Hashtags are one of those things you should know.

A hashtag is when the # symbol is used to mark keywords or topics in a Tweet. It’s like a tag or category in a blog and is a way to organize or categorize tweets. But you don’t just hashtag anything. Read More

This weekend I was listening to a book on economics because I’m a complete dork and that type of stuff interests me. One of the lines that stuck out to me was a truism of statistics that the author quoted, “Correlation does not equal Causality.” In other words, just because two things seem connected doesn’t mean that one caused the other. Don’t worry, that’s the last of the economics talk.

Today, I was catching up on some church marketing reading and came across Todd Henry’s article at Church Marketing Sucks, “Eliminating False Assumptions“. He was writing about the same type of thing. In his article he writes about how we need to be careful not let assumptions control what we do, but rather examine what is really happening and challenge those assumptions. Read More

A couple weeks ago I wrote about faking social media. Generally speaking, it’s best to avoid faking social media and, instead, work on creating real connections with people. This is especially important for the church. But just because you shouldn’t totally fake your church’s social media presence, doesn’t mean there aren’t some tools you can use to make things easier and more efficient.

Here are 5 tools which can make you more effective at social media and save you time: Read More

Church SEO

When people search for churches in your city does your church website appear at the top of Google, Yahoo, and Bing? No? Studies show that most people use search engines to find what they are looking for, including churches. If you aren't on the first page, you are missing out on visitors. Learn more about Church SEO at CMO University

About Church Marketing Online

Church Marketing Online is dedicated helping churches reach the people in their communities through the Internet. We do this by explaining search engine marketing for churches, discussing social media and how it can be used by churches, and facilitating conversations about other online church marketing ideas. The CMO blog is here to educate, discuss Internet evangelism and outreach, and offer church growth resources.